#oneaday Day 722: Entering the ATmosphere

I read yesterday that several blogging platforms are integrating the "AT protocol" or whatever it's called that powers services like Bluesky and the like, and one of those was WordPress. So today's post is primarily a big ol' test to see whether or not that functionality, implemented via the ATmosphere plugin, actually works, and whether or not it's something I actually want to use.

people holding different devices — Photo by fauxels on Pexels.com. These people are all enjoying my posts. You should, too.

I talked a bit about social media with my therapist yesterday. I discussed how conflicted I feel about existing online right now, what with the emphasis on short-form video and vapid content rather than longer-form, more meaningful material. I'm not saying that the stuff I post here isn't vapid nonsense, of course, but I have always said that I would far rather read someone's vapid nonsense than be delivered it as shouty-face-at-camera content, so this blog continues with that in mind. And if no-one is interested in my vapid nonsense, then at least I still have somewhere to bang out some words and express myself, which is what this has always been about.

Anyway, the kind-of-sort-of conclusion I came to was that at least a minimal presence on social media is somewhat desirable for me, because otherwise I just end up feeling completely isolated. While I enjoyed the total break from all social media, including Bluesky, that I took last year while I was on holiday, I found that I didn't want to maintain it afterwards, as it just left me feeling even more lonely than I already was. And I'm already feeling pretty damn lonely.

Still, the other thing that came to light in yesterday's session is that although I have always kind of feared social interactions and find myself overthinking conversations before I have them — sometimes to the extent that I never actually start the conversation in reality for the fear of coming across as boring or annoying — I am, in many respects, feeling kind of ready to challenge myself in at least attempting to make some new friends, to have some people that I can connect with and, basically, to stop feeling so danged lonely.

The challenge that I have found along the way is not so much initiating those interactions when the opportunity arises — although that is still a somewhat scary prospect for me — but rather finding those opportunities in the first place. I cited an example of when I first went to university and attended a pre-term music course, and I took the uncharacteristically bold step (for me) of introducing myself to someone I was in a lift with while we were transporting ourselves to our respective floors in the tower block where we were staying. That resulted in a longstanding friendship (albeit one that I will hold my hands up and say that I have been very poor at maintaining) and was proof that, as little as I think of myself at times, I can come across as someone that people actually do want to know and are not, in fact, actively repulsed by.

Those opportunities of being "trapped" in a lift with a stranger and the choice being either awkward silence or attempting to clunkily start a conversation just don't really seem to arise these days, though, because I'm never in that sort of situation. I work from home, I don't go out a great deal, I'm not a member of any "groups" or anything (and don't really know how one would go about finding a "group") and I do not have a publicly accessible elevator in my house.

What I am going to at least attempt to do a bit more, though, is to attend some in-person events where I know some people with whom I have at least a casual acquaintance will be attending. My trip to The Cave a few weeks back was a good example, and last year I went to the RetroFest show in Swindon — that is actually happening again this year, but I left it a bit late to organise a trip there. I mean, I could probably snag a ticket and go along tomorrow (today's tickets are sold out), but can I be bothered to do that?

Hmm, can I be bothered to do that…? I might have a think about that throughout the course of today. Swindon is a fairly long way to go, but it might actually be nice to go along and see some interesting things and clever people.

Hmmmmm.

Anyway, today we are going food shopping, so that's fun. Thank you for participating in this experiment of whether or not this thing actually posts correctly to Bluesky via the ATmosphere plugin. If it does, I'll likely hook up MoeGamer proper in the same way. Tatty-bye for now then.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 721: Sippy cup

I have finally joined the ranks of the Grown Adults Who Have a Sippy Cup, after my wife picked one up and said she liked it. Specifically, she got herself the catchily named YETI Rambler C Straw Bottle, Stainless Steel Vacuum Insulated Bottle with Leakproof Straw Cap, Tropical Pink, 18 oz (532 ml). She said it was very good for making a whole lot of drink and keeping it nice and cold for the whole day, which is something I found quite appealing.

Not my wife. Or my kid. Or indeed the right colour bottle. Or at all representative of our typical activities. But it serves its illustrative purpose.

As such, I ordered myself a YETI Rambler Straw Mug, Stainless Steel Vacuum Insulated Mug with Stronghold Lid, Rescue Red, 42 oz (1.2 l). You will notice that mine is considerably larger than hers. I thought I might as well get a big 'un because the fewer times you have to fill it up, the more likely you are to drink all of it and, by extension, have what is supposedly "enough fluids" for the day — something which a bit of casual research last night (not using AI) suggested there is actually no real scientific or medical consensus on.

£45 felt like a lot to spend on a mug, but then I figured everything is fucking expensive right now, so I might as well buy a nice thing that I'll get some use out of. I went to the shop the other evening to get some drinks and snacks and it somehow came out to more than £70. By those standards, video games seem like quite a bargain right now.

I like the mug! It's big and hefty and satisfying to use, the reusable straw seems to work just fine, and it is indeed nice and convenient to be able to carry around over a litre of drink in a receptacle that keeps it nice and cool. Or indeed to just have it on my desk, to be consumed bit by bit over the course of several hours.

The whole meme about "staying hydrated" honestly annoys me quite a bit, because it seems to be just one of those things that people say without really thinking about it. And yes, it is a meme. Because the population of the Internet is completely incapable of doing anything with any sort of sincerity and seriousness, the whole thing started as a big joke. Sure, over the long term, it may well have got people drinking more fluids throughout the day — and thus can we really call it a bad thing? — but to me, the people who always bang on about "staying hydrated" always come across as performative, like they want to appear superior to everyone else because they drink a bit more water than you do.

I realise it's a bit of a silly thing to get annoyed about — why get annoyed at good advice? — but like I say, it's the whole insincerity of it that grates somewhat. Because some people do just say it, not out of a desire to see their friends be healthy, but just because it's a funny haha meme that they've seen their favourite streamers say. Hell, there's even a bot on Twitch designed to "remind" people to drink water.

I also think it comes across as somewhat infantilising, and that's a real problem that the younger generations in particular appear to be suffering with right now. Just yesterday, some of us were chatting on Discord about an encounter one of us had had where a 21-year old was proving very difficult to deal with because they seemingly wanted to be treated like an incompetent child. (It was to get out of financial obligations.) Any time some streamer tells their audience to "stay hydrated", I get that same energy.

But anyway. There are worse things that people could be saying — and, of course, do elsewhere on the Internet. So I probably shouldn't let myself get too wound up by this sort of thing. After all, since I, too, now have a big-ass sippy cup, I am officially equipped to be smug about Being Hydrated.

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#oneaday Day 720: Finally ditching Chrome

I have, today, finally ditched Google Chrome. At least that's the plan. I am typing this from Firefox. I actually haven't had nearly as many issues with Chrome as some people seem to have had — at least not on my work computer upstairs — but just recently I've been having some awful performance issues on my downstairs living room PC, and it certainly very much seems like Chrome is to blame.

close up of a red fox in shiroishi japan — Photo by Alan W on Pexels.com. This fox is thinking about installing Linux.

I could be wrong, of course. It could just be Windows 11 being shit (although in that regard, my work PC also runs Windows 11 and seems fine performance-wise, despite being a meagre mini-PC) and it could also just be my PC being shit (the living room PC, much as I love it, has had a litany of problems over the years that has necessitated multiple reformats and reinstalls) — but for now, I'm taking Chrome out of the equation down here.

I've been putting off doing this, because changing Web browsers feels like a massive pain in the arse. You have your previous one all set up the way you like it with extensions, saved passwords and everything already logged in, and then you switch over and have to set everything up again, log into everything again and it's… man, it just feels like work, y'know, and all I want to do is look something up online.

That said, despite the mental block I've historically felt towards doing this, the process of switching over to Firefox has been mostly painless so far. The export-import procedure seems to have gone fairly smoothly (though it did import duplicates of all my bookmarks which it has apparently previously imported from Chrome) and thus far Firefox has neither crashed nor frozen my entire system for minutes at a time, which is more than I can say for the current state of Chrome.

I even managed to export my passwords from Google Password Manager to Firefox's autofill feature, so logging in to most websites hopefully won't be a huge pain in the arse, aside from those that insist on two-factor authentication and I have, inevitably, left my phone in a location that I am not in.

Firefox isn't perfect, I know, but I do have a modicum of respect for it for allowing you to set a blanket "fuck off with all this AI shit" switch. It unfortunately doesn't prevent Google from serving you up stupid AI Overviews or stop the Internet in general from obsessing over this loathsome technology, but I like being able to ensure the software I am running locally on my computer — at least while it's still possible to do that — is working the way I want it to and not, say, downloading 4GB local LLMs in the background.

Talking about one's Web browser is the height of tedium, I know, but it's been very hot today, I'm very tired and stressed out, and I just wanted to write something before my chicken wings arrive. This was the first thing that came to mind, so that's what you get. Hey, I never promised that every day's posts would be interesting, all right?

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#oneaday Day 719: Get out of here with your "streak freeze"

Yesterday, the following notification popped up for me:

Yesterday: You earned an activity streak freeze

I've already written at length about how the modern concept of "streaks" is inherently unhealthy and encourages people to just game the system rather than actually properly developing good habits, but this is a whole new level of stupid. I was curious as to exactly what a "streak freeze" entailed, so I clicked through on the notification and found the following explanation:

Activity Streak: You're on a 7-day activity streak. If you miss a day, your freeze will keep it alive -- keep posting, liking, commenting, or following.

See all your achievements.

So let me get this straight: WordPress (or Jetpack, I think, specifically) has a "streak" mechanic built in to encourage you to engage with… something every day. (Note that the explanation above counts "liking, commenting or following" as "activity", not just "posting something on your site".) But after 7 days, you can just go "ah, fuck this" for a day and still keep your "streak" intact?

Now, I've hopefully already made my feelings on "streaks" clear (and yes, I know it might seem a tad hypocritical given that I'm posting daily, counting how many days I have done that for and have even done extra posts some days to "catch up" on days I missed but… shut up) but to me the concept of a "streak freeze" just feels like… cheating? And, more to the point, it's a completely pointless form of cheating in which the only person you are actually cheating is yourself. (Yes, I am familiar with the copypasta.)

It's not just me seeing this, right? Given that your "streak" in WordPress or Jetpack or whatever is visible to no-one but you — there are no "Share" buttons on these stupid "achievements" it has apparently started giving you — there is absolutely no point whatsoever in cheating the system for any reason other than to deny to yourself, and no-one else, that you failed to do something as simple as click "Like" on a thing every day for [x] days.

As I say, I acknowledge completely that all of the above might be a bit rich coming from someone who has occasionally missed a day on his "daily" blog and then "caught up" the following day, but I do always acknowledge when I've done that, and I'm not giving myself any "awards" or anything besides counting how many days have elapsed between June 8, 2024 and today. (And yes, I did just use the opportunity to check that my post numbering is correct. It is.)

The way this is implemented as platform "achievements" just feels like they wanted to completely gamify the posting experience, then got cold feet partway through and thought but what about all the people who care about their streak and just don't have time to click Like on something every day?! — as if they were afraid that they would get complaints from people who thought it was "unfair" that they broke their streak just for not… maintaining that streak.

I dunno. I am very aware that this is all a completely pointless thing to get riled up about, but it is very hot, I am very tired and stressed, and just wanted something easy to write about today. So that's what you're getting. Now I'm off to go and swallow an entire iceberg or something. And not the kind that freezes streaks.

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#oneaday Day 718: Melting

I cursed it. The other day, I said to Andie, "oh, it hasn't been obscenely hot this year yet, has it?" and literally the day after, it became obscenely hot. The air conditioner for the bedroom has come out, the fans are on full blast, and just general existence is suffering right now.

a city during sunset — Photo by Fatih Turan on Pexels.com

Naturally, all the usual arguments are taking place over whether or not people from the UK really have a right to complain about it being hot, given that certain parts of the world are far hotter than it gets here, and they get by perfectly well without air conditioning, what happened to that stiff upper lip and all that, eh what? To anyone having thoughts of that nature, I say a hearty fuck off, it is boiling here and we, as a people, are very much Not Built For That.

We are a people built for overcast days, where the weather just sort of exists in the background without doing anything. We don't mind an occasional rainstorm, because that means we can complain about it. But when it gets hot — and for a good few years now, the summers have been getting real hot — it is actively unpleasant, and quite possibly dangerous for some people. One of the people I work with said that the temperature was almost 40 degrees C in his office today. That is not any sort of condition that a human being should even be attempting to exist in!

But still. At least it's a good opportunity to get the ice out, have some cold drinks, enjoy an ice cream or ten and occasionally sit in the garden if you think you can get away with doing so without irradiating yourself beyond repair. Maybe even have a barbecue! Some people in the nearby vicinity have been having barbecues over the past couple of days and they have smelled delicious. We have not, as yet, planned to do one, because neither of us fancy standing over a hot thing on a hot day, and with only a couple of weeks left until we go away on holiday, the opportunities for socialising before we head off are limited. Maybe when we get back.

Anyway, aside from the heat, today has been relatively unremarkable. I have done some work, I have played some Final Fantasy XI, I enjoyed a chicken sandwich with some Sweet Baby Ray's barbecue sauce. The cats have been yelling at us, and all is, it seems, mostly well.

It's just too bloody hot, is what it is!

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#oneaday Day 717: Putting down the Zilart

I have finally beaten both Final Fantasy XI's base story and its first expansion, Rise of the Zilart, which was released alongside the game when it first came west. This means that I have, at last, beaten the entirety of what most people seem to regard as "the original Final Fantasy XI story", since most folks seem to consider Rise of the Zilart the actual conclusion to the story that begins when you start playing the game.

It's been a lot of fun thus far. I'm about 80 hours deep into the game, and I haven't really felt particularly "roadblocked" at any point. There have been two separate occasions where I have had help from higher-level players — once to open the "Three Mage Gate" I mentioned a few posts back, and once to help me with the fight against Siren as part of the Rhapsodies of Vana'diel series of missions that run parallel to all the main stories — but for the most part, I have successfully beaten and bashed my way through the game as a solo player using the computer-controlled "Trust" party members.

I thought I had reached a roadblock towards the end of the Rise of the Zilart storyline where you are presented with a chain of five difficult boss battles, and I was having real difficulty with a couple of them. As I'm playing a Warrior, I have been working on the assumption that I should be the main "tank", you see, and thus trying my best to ensure all enemies fixate their attention on my while my Trusts repeatedly punch them in the buttocks. This is, after all, the way things are in Final Fantasy XIV, even though mechanically the two games are otherwise quite different.

However, what I discovered in these difficult fights (the "Ark Angels" fights, to any FFXI veterans) is that being the sole human player and the main tank is not always desirable. Y'see, some high-level enemies have the ability to Charm you, and when that happens all your Trusts get unsummoned and the fight effectively resets. It's an instant "kill", in other words, and I really thought this was going to roadblock me.

Then I thought about things a bit, and wondered what might happen if I let one of the Trusts handle the tanking instead. Wouldn't you know it, those fights suddenly went much more smoothly. I could keep dealing damage — which, besides tanking, is the other thing FFXI Warrior is good at — while Trust-y Valaineral the Paladin took the brunt of everything the boss threw at a single target, including that pesky Charm. And, because I also had Kupipi the White Mage and King Of Hearts the Red Mage in my party, they cleansed that status off him pretty quickly. I only really came close to failing in one of the fights, where everyone got Silenced and Valaineral got knocked down because no-one could heal him. Thankfully, this happened late enough in the fight that the remaining party members, including me, were able to finish the job.

By contrast, the actual final boss of Rise of the Zilart was very easy indeed. Granted, I was probably a few levels higher than "intended" for this encounter — Final Fantasy XI isn't particularly rigorous about locking stuff to particular level restrictions, particularly in the main story sequences — but it was still pretty straightforward. Fun, though; it was satisfying to finally bring down a "big bad" who had been taunting me for some time.

Now I'm on to the Chains of Promathia expansion, which a lot of longtime players seem to think is one of the best bits. It makes the curious decision to base the early hours of its story around the level 30 mark, rather than assuming you would be at the level you're probably at around the conclusion of Rise of the Zilart — 75+ — but I assume that things ramp up pretty quickly, as the official "content guide" on the Final Fantasy XI website recommends the expansion as an activity for level 75+ players.

I'm really glad I've done this! I'm going to write a big, detailed article about my experiences over on MoeGamer when I'm finally done with everything I want to do in the game, but for now, my feelings are that, in terms of gameplay, progression and a general sense of adventure, this is actually one of the very best Final Fantasy games. Yes, it is the very epitome of a "guide dang-it" game, in which you will almost certainly not get very far without looking some stuff up, but the moment-to-moment gameplay, the overall sense of progression and the fact that it feels like a Final Fantasy game, arguably a lot more so than XIV, has really left me with a big grin on my face. I'm looking forward to seeing what the rest of the game has to offer.

I have played pretty much all day, though, so I should probably stop for now, though, right? Probably…

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#oneaday Day 716: They changed Feasts and I'm not sure how I feel about it

Walls have introduced a "new recipe" on their Feast ice cream, probably one of the most longstanding ice creams there has been. Feasts were around in the '80s when I was first aware of ice cream, and they are still around today. Only now they are, for what I believe is the first time, different to what they used to be.

What's funny to me is in their big banner ad, they have the original Feast, which is no longer available, directly over the new ones.

For anyone unfamiliar with a Feast, the original incarnation of them was a chocolate ice lolly with crunchy biscuit pieces embedded in the chocolate, and inside the chocolate shell was chocolate ice cream, which surrounded a hard chocolate core. Much like a Cadbury's Creme Egg, I'm sure people had their own ways of eating a Feast, but I always liked to flake the chocolate outer off, then eat the ice cream, then have the hard chocolate core as the grand finale.

Now, though, they have changed. Now you still have the chocolate outer with the crunchy bits embedded, but the chocolate ice cream has been replaced with vanilla, and the hard chocolate core has been replaced with a chocolate hazelnut core that appears to occupy a curious state somewhere between liquid and solid. It sticks to the lolly stick and retains its shape, but it doesn't have the satisfying "snap" that the old hard chocolate core did; it's more chewy and sticky.

Taken on its own terms, the new Feast is not an unpleasant experience to eat. Chocolate, vanilla and hazelnut is a good combination, and they work together. But I'm not sure they should have replaced the basic Feast model with it. The original Feast was a classic, and one of my favourite ice creams, and now it appears that it's just Not A Thing any more, because this "new recipe" has seemingly replaced the old one. At least they haven't had the gall to keep calling it "Feast Original", because, well, it's not original any more.

Apparently there is also a Feast Caramel now, which replaces the new hazelnut core with a caramel sauce centre, and I can see that being pretty good. But, again, I feel like it's not really a Feast as we once new it; the hard chocolate core was a central (no pun intended) part of the Feast's identity, and I'm not entirely sure why it has been taken away, rather than being positioned as a new variant called "Feast Hazelnut" or something. Did we have to lose the classic "Feast Original" for this?

There are, as you might expect, some people online who are absolutely furious about this. I wouldn't put myself in that category, as I found the new Feasts perfectly tasty — they're just not what I expected from a Feast, and it seems strange and confusing that they would make this change now, after so long of them being the same thing.

The common assumption, of course, is that this is an instance of enshittification, but I'm not sure that is the case; perhaps the vanilla ice cream is cheaper than the chocolate ice cream, and perhaps the chocolate hazelnut half-sauce-half-solid otherworldly substance in the middle is cheaper than a hard lump of chocolate, but I have no real way of knowing that. I'm just a bit sad to see something I've enjoyed since childhood feel the need to change fairly drastically for reasons that are not entirely clear.

Oh well. These things happen, I guess. This is, it seems, what a Feast is now. Although apparently Aldi do a good clone of the original Feast, known as Fiesta. Might have to track some of those down…

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#oneaday Day 715: Fuck Valnet

My distaste for groups like Valnet and GAMURS is hopefully well-established by this point, but today there's a whole new disgusting chapter to the sorry saga that, so far, has resulted in an almost entirely non-functional games press in 2026. According to Lex Luddy of startmenu, Valnet has just issued new contracts to writers on TheGamer (a site which Valnet had already gutted of its main features staff) saying that they will not get paid unless their articles reach a minimum viewership threshold. As Luddy points out, the remaining staff at TheGamer — and indeed across Valnet — already had pay that was tied to overall article performance, but this new step provides a hard cutoff on whether or not they get paid at all, based on viewership.

man in gloves sitting with hands on face over laptop — Photo by Never Dull Studio on Pexels.com

This is, I won't beat around the bush, disgusting. Tying pay to article performance is already a shitty thing to do, but to withhold pay completely based on view counts is outright exploitative. And it's not as if writers on Valnet sites are getting paid fairly anyway.

As several people replying to Luddy on that Bluesky thread pointed out, this has been a longstanding problem with online media in general. It should be the writers' responsibility to produce the material, and it should be the people running the website from a business perspective's responsibility to promote that material and ensure it gets read.

Unfortunately, for a long time now, writers have been forced into a position where they have to write provocative, baiting articles in the hope that they will get clicks, because the people running the sites seemingly just… don't do anything other than lay people off. And, of course, bring generative AI into the picture, because this type of Business Idiot has no understanding whatsoever of how the actual audience has zero desire to read AI-generated content, instead believing that because generative AI is fashionable and responsible for billions of dollars of imaginary money being thrown around, they might be able to get a piece of that pie by enshittifying their website.

And the really stupid thing is that you never can predict what is going to spread across the Web and "do well" if it's left up to the writers. There is no magic formula that says "IF you write an article like this, THEN it will always succeed". There are manipulative tactics — like clickbait and ragebait — that sometimes work, but more and more people are wise to them today, and refuse to share material that falls into that category. Video game enthusiasts are some of the most online-savvy people out there for the most part, so resorting to these tactics is declining in effectiveness as time goes on.

What does seem to work — to an extent, at least — is having someone who is responsible for making sure those articles get seen: advertising the website. Effective use of a dedicated social media manager is why longstanding sites like IGN and Eurogamer are still just about hanging in there, but they are the last few remaining holdouts of a once vibrant and thriving media sector — and they have their own issues. IGN, for example, is currently butting heads with its Creators' Guild union over fair pay rises in line with inflation, and Eurogamer cut its editorial staff considerably a while back.

Once again, I have to say that I am baffled by this. Video games, as a creative sector, are bigger than they have ever been, with a broader, more diverse range of releases than ever before. So why are we, collectively, apparently completely incapable of sustaining an enthusiast press?

Moreover, retro gaming is more accessible than ever before, too, meaning that there is a worthwhile place for some retro-centric sites to spring up and do a good job of covering classic gaming material — but so far, we've seen very few outlets even attempt to step into this space, with only Time Extension online and Retro Gamer in print coming to mind outside of the unpaid (or at least non-commercial) enthusiast blog sector.

The usual answer to this is "b-but YouTubers and streamers!" and I'm sorry, I don't buy it. YouTubers and streamers have a place in the modern media landscape, sure, but they fulfil a completely different function to a traditional press — and moreover, they demand a completely different sort of attention to written material. And if you've ever accused a traditional press outlet of "paid reviews", then I have some unfortunate news to tell you about a widespread concept known as "influencer marketing".

I am sad about all this! I spent a significant portion of my life looking at my brother with intense admiration for his role in helping to shape the games press in its prime, both in print and online, and hoping that I would one day be able to follow in his footsteps! And yet, by the time I did manage to get a meaningful foothold, things were already starting to collapse. I was, somehow, too late — and I am having great difficulty understanding why, because it's not as if video games have gone anywhere. One would think with the sheer number of the bloody things being released pretty much every day at this point, a functional games press would be a desirable thing to have. And by "functional", I mean "one with full-time employees who get paid a fair salary on which they can live, enjoy the medium that they have chosen to specialise in and be able to have a good work-life balance".

And yet here we are. I despair sometimes, I really do.

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#oneaday Day 714: End of a long week

It's been a very long, stressful, challenging week, but I'm finally at the end of it. Sure, I had to work a little late this evening (by choice — I wanted to get the thing I was working on finished before the weekend so I could start afresh on some other things I need to do next week) but now it is officially the weekend. And it's a long one, too, what with it being a bank holiday on Monday.

grayscale photo of elderly man sleeping on a rock — Photo by PRIYA MISHRA on Pexels.com

I am tired. Very tired. I'm also worried that we have not-very-long to get a hell of a lot done, but no-one else seems to be panicking about it, so I'm trying not to panic. Trying. I am mostly succeeding, but there are times when I do feel a bit "OH GOD OH SHIT WHAT THE HELL". I can usually get through those times, though.

This is something I was talking about at therapy this week. One of the things that has sort of… emerged in our conversations is the fact that I do have what my therapist describes as a "wise" side, which, at times of great difficulty, anxiety or stress, can usually break through the noise of poor mental health and set me if not completely "right", then certainly on a somewhat more productive path than staring at a wall wishing the entire world would go away for a bit.

It is a challenge, sometimes, to allow that apparently "wise" part of myself to speak, but one thing I am learning to acknowledge about myself is that this part of myself does exist, and that when I do allow it to speak, it usually has something eminently sensible to say. It's not a part of me that admonishes me for making mistakes or doing things inefficiently; it just calmly, gently says to me something along the lines of "look, here are the facts, here is what you can do about it, here is what you probably should do about it" and then, barring a complete breakdown of mental health, I can usually then get on with the thing.

Of course, in the past I have experienced times where that voice can't get through. I have experienced times where things really were bad, and I knew there was no way of really avoiding the "bad". I endured, though, and I like to think my experiences have made me stronger as a result. After all, as much of a state as I consider myself to be in at times, I am still here. I am still going. I am still fighting. I haven't given up.

And oh, there have been times when it would have been easy to give up. At least one of those occasions has been immortalised on this blog, although at the time I sort of danced around the subject in the things I was writing, because I think on some level I was conscious of the fact that although I was having thoughts of giving up on everything at times, I didn't really want to follow through on them in any sort of way that would have had permanent consequences. Hell, I'm doing it now, because part of me doesn't believe that I was ever really willing to give up.

And I guess maybe I wasn't. Because, like I say, I am still here. There are things I would like to change. Things I would like to improve. Things that I wish were different. But I know all of those are things that I can, potentially, do something about. I am not helpless. I am not useless or worthless. There is reason and value to my existence.

That got a tad deeper than I perhaps intended, but it was one of those occasions when the thoughts just sort of started flowing, so I thought I'd run with it. Anyway, I'm off to go and eat ice cream and play some video games now. Have a lovely long weekend, everyone.

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#oneaday Day 713: Portal charm

Apparently Google is attempting to wind down its search feature. You know, the thing that they once did so well that their name became a verb for doing that thing. But we live in 2026, possibly the stupidest year in human existence, so they've decided that they want to stop doing the thing that they've always been well regarded for doing better than anyone else — although they have been enshittifying it for years at this point. Instead they're going to force on us the thing that C-suites the world over think everyone wants, and no-one except bootlicking cunts actually wants: the chatbot! Hooray!

person pulling a sack of garbage — Photo by Mumtahina Tanni on Pexels.com. The Internet, 2026

This is, obviously, garbage news, and anyone with any sense will already be looking for a new search engine to set as default on every device they own — even though I don't think there's a single one of them that has no AI whatsoever at this point — but there are interesting possibilities that present themselves as a result of this stupidity.

Firstly, if there's no Google search, that might finally mean we'll be free of search engine optimisation, which by extension means we might also end up free of clickbait and ragebait. Of course, the latter two options are driven as much by social media than search results — probably more so, if we're honest — but honestly, I can't say I'd be sorry to see the back of SEO. Ten Blue Links are no fun if all of them are jostling for position with articles titled "what time is Eurovision on?" or whatever.

Of course, another ugly possibility then presents itself: search engine optimisation will become chatbot optimisation, and I suspect that will be even worse. SEO can already be manipulated by bad actors to present confidently incorrect information as gospel — sometimes with nefarious intent — and chatbots are already renowned for picking up people saying obvious falsehoods as a throwaway comment in a Reddit thread, and then reporting those things as the truth. Remember glue on pizza? Yeah. Incidents like that are chatbot optimisation in its earliest incarnation.

So that brings us to the second point: what if this is what gets us to admit that the "World Wide" part of the "Web" has, in fact, been something of a failure. I think we can probably all agree that the US has dominated the Web for a significant portion of its lifespan, and it's US-based companies that are trying to reshape it in a fashion that will, they reckon, make billions for US-based billionaires who already have too many billions.

Of course, all of the businesses attempting to do this are failing miserably at that. Despite billions of imaginary dollars being thrown around on a seemingly daily basis, profitability appears to be something that continues to elude the generative AI space, and it only appears to be getting worse, with many providers switching to considerably more expensive token-based billing options for users who have, up until now, been costing these companies astronomical amounts of money.

But even if the entire generative AI space were to go tits-up tomorrow — and oh, gosh, I would love it if it did — I think a lot of damage has already been done to the original plan of the World Wide Web. The Internet is no longer a cool and exciting place to hang out and explore. It's become a sleazy, shitty inner city area where you shouldn't walk around after dark, and where you certainly shouldn't get your phone out on the street. So much of it is just there to if not outright scam you, then at least extract money from you in increasingly ridiculous ways.

I see it a lot, running a blog. I'll install a plugin that sounds like it performs a function that I would find helpful, only to find that the exact function I want to use is "only available in Premium", and of course you can't just buy Premium because it's 2026, you have to sign up for a subscription. And you can't pay monthly for that subscription because it's 2026, you can only pay for a year at a time, despite them quoting a "monthly" price on their order page. The Web in general is full of shitty, dark patterns like this designed to trick people into spending money they didn't need to spend. I have no objection to paying people for good, useful pieces of software, but not when the process of doing so is a minefield of potentially getting locked into having to shell out several hundred quid a year because you didn't see the tiny "*billed annually" at the bottom of the "BEST OFFER!" thrust in your face.

Anyway, I got a bit off the point. The main point was: the current implementation of "the World Wide Web" is shit, so what if this meant that we go back to the concept of "portals"? Portals, if you're unfamiliar, are how sites like Yahoo got started: they were designed to act as the first page you saw when you logged on to the Internet, and thus provided quick, categorised, curated sets of links that helped you to 1) find stuff that you were looking for and 2) discover interesting new stuff. Search engines developed out of portals; indeed, many former portal sites became search engines; Google itself was a bit of an outlier in this regard in that it launched as nothing more than a search engine; its intention to do one thing, really well.

I often think back to our early days of "going online" back home. After the BBS days, which we occasionally indulged in on both the Atari 8-bit and ST, we had a CompuServe subscription. And CompuServe was a ton of fun! It was a complete walled garden to begin with, and took a while to catch on to this whole "broader Internet" thing, but in many ways, retrospectively, I think that its curated way of doing things was very good. People rag on AOL for the bajillion free trial coaste… sorry, CDs that made their way around the world in the late '90s and early '00s, but they had a similar idea: present information in an interesting, clear, curated way for people to enjoy and engage with as they see fit.

Of course, this approach brings with it its own considerations: who is responsible for the curation? How does one get "noticed" with a personal project like a blog? Are these portal providers obliged to be "neutral" in terms of things like politics and suchlike? If not, how does one distinguish between a portal provider that places an emphasis on curating information that is actively harmful, and one that aligns with your own values? Probably the same way you pick a news source today, I guess.

Anyway, I don't really have an answer, but if Google is insistent on going the way of the chatbot, this is probably something we're going to have to grapple with in the next few years. The way the Internet is today just… isn't really working, at least not with the original intent of the technology in mind, so we should probably start thinking about how we can do something a bit different… a bit better.

Or we could just continue to moan on social media and never actually get anything done, I guess.

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